Friday 10 June 2011 17.00 EDT
First published on Friday 10 June 2011 17.00 EDT

The timing of a leak often tells its own story and leaves its own fingerprints. When two leaks potentially damaging to Labour's two frontbench heavy-hitters – Ed Miliband and Ed Balls – come upon each another's heels, that smells of conspiracy. However, coincidence may be the duller explanation for why the Telegraph's leaked Balls papers and David Miliband's acceptance speech-that-never-was in the Guardian arrived together.

What new do these documents tell us? Nothing, beyond a needling reminder that both Eds were part of Brown's push to get Blair out soon after the 2005 election. The plots, spite and loathing over the TB/GB war years already fill many a volume, but these are relatively tame notes of the negotiations for handover. Brown's scrawled comments on Blair – "shallow", "muddled" and "inconsistent" – are laughably polite considering years of expletives from both camps poured into both ears of any passing journalist.

All this is known: before leaving, Blair tried to cement Brown's feet into his own policies and Brown wouldn't have it. What's new? Old leaders try to force their legacy on their successors – remember Margaret Thatcher leaning out of that Downing Street window behind John Major? But new leaders demand a trajectory of their own. That Brown turned out to have no blueprint of his own, vacillating while scarcely veering off Blair's direction, is his own tragedy – but that's another story. Of course, Tories and their newspapers love to rake over the ashes of the last government's pointless internecine dysfunction. Those ashes still smoulder among old Blairites. Mostly departed for fertile pastures in the private sector, occasionally they issuing a sideswipe call for Labour to embrace private competition or eschew that bogeyman, Old Labour.

To be sure, Balls has old enemies and he makes new ones a bit too easily. Envy of his pre-eminence is only part of it: Balls snubs people and rubs them up the wrong way, no sufferer of fools. Charming, clever and funny when he wants to be, he can be abrupt and dictatorial with colleagues. All the same, it looks unlikely that this pile of old documents came from any Labour source. Balls says they were among the papers left behind in the Education Department that should have been sent on to him, and eyebrows are raised among former ministers at anyone even taking such political papers to their office, let alone leaving them there. There are doubts the investigation will discover who stole them.

Naturally Michael Gove, whose department is to be investigated, eagerly suggests the leak came Labour – from disgruntled Blairites or from friends of brother David, resentful at his loss by a whisker. Fortuitously, the David Miliband speech arrives as if there were indeed a conspiracy to undermine brother Ed. But on one thing the Guardian is clear: the David Miliband leak came from quite another source to the Telegraph's. Though both in their very different ways may undermine the two Eds, they are not linked in some conspiracy against Labour's leadership.

However, they both catch Labour at a weak time, still too uncertain which way to go. Waiting for 23 policy reviews, there is a lack of outrage at the Cameron government. Many frontbenchers, not chosen by the leader under Labour's daft constitution, are indeed tepid and shadowy presences. The NHS mayhem should be a daily gift to John Healey, as should be Eric Pickles's blundering thuggery, untouched by the feeble Caroline Flint. Too many of them lack either genuine anger or forensic political skill in attack. Parties are always fractious – but consider how little internal strife there is compared with any time in Labour's past. Tory discontent is vocal, the coalition is full of friction and the Lib Dems are writhing in their death throes, making Labour look relatively harmonious.

The well-crafted David Miliband speech has stirring and eloquent words: he will always be one of the multitudinous "what ifs" in Labour's history. But history will also record that he had his chance to save his party – around the time of James Purnell's resignation – when he could have rallied the cabinet against letting Brown lead them to certain calamity, but he ducked it. That was his moment, when he might have salvaged enough seats to create a Lib-Lab coalition. It was a sad moment for the party to choose between two good brothers, but it will be even sadder if "David the lost leader" forever looms over his brother, with people wistfully leaking unmade speeches.

This was a speech addressed to the voters, not the party, who would by then have been secondary. My guess is that not many in Labour will be stirred into wishing they had a leader who seems a little closer in economics to George Osborne than to Ed Balls, a little stronger on "war on drugs" type rhetoric. Where we stand now, as cuts begin to do real harm with Osborne's Plan A cracking apart, it seems likely that Labour would do better spelling out a new Plan B.

Why would the Telegraph keep this old leak until now? The Brown past, unfairly blamed for the deficit, is still an open wound to be poked until Labour finds a way to heal it. Maybe Balls should be flattered as they zero in on him. His daily smart-bombing of "too far, too fast" cuts is starting to rattle the Tories as each worsening set of economic indicators questions the wisdom of Osborne's extreme austerity – slow/no growth, sluggish exports, plummeting consumer confidence, retail sales dismal and the deficit not shrinking to target. But while polls still show "Labour to blame", there is still a lot of painful past to be overcome – and easily exploited by the Tories and their press.